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Updated: Dec 14, 2025

Recording Spatially Restricted Oscillations in the Hippocampus of Behaving Mice
Published on: July 1, 2018
Low-frequency oscillations reflect aberrant tone restoration during the auditory continuity illusion in schizophrenia
Joseph Wooldridge1, Mathis Kaiser2,3, Yadira Roa Romero2
1Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, St. Hedwig Hospital, Große Hamburger Str. 5-11, 10115, Berlin, Germany. joseph.d.wooldridge@gmail.com.
Abstract:
Patients with schizophrenia (ScZ) often show impairments in auditory information processing. These impairments have been related to clinical symptoms, such as auditory hallucinations. Some researchers have hypothesized that aberrant low-frequency oscillations contribute to auditory information processing deficits in ScZ. A paradigm for which modulations in low-frequency oscillations are consistently found in healthy individuals is the auditory continuity illusion (ACI), in which restoration processes lead to a perceptual grouping of tone fragments and a mask, so that a physically interrupted sound is perceived as continuous. We used the ACI paradigm to test the hypothesis that low-frequency oscillations play a role in aberrant auditory information processing in patients with ScZ (N = 23). Compared with healthy control participants we found that patients with ScZ show elevated continuity illusions of interrupted, partially-masked tones. Electroencephalography data demonstrate that this elevated continuity perception is reflected by diminished 3 Hz power. This suggests that reduced low-frequency oscillations relate to elevated restoration processes in ScZ. Our findings support the hypothesis that aberrant low-frequency oscillations contribute to altered perception-related auditory information processing in ScZ.
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